TEAM WHIMSY: Day 2, "Notes on the Impossibility of Nirvana"
Title: Notes on the Impossibility of Nirvana
Author: lamentables
Team: Whimsy
Prompt: "You made me come all the way up here for this?"
Pairing(s): Fraser/Vecchio
Length: 3,700 words
Rating: PG-13 (for violence)
Warnings: None
Summary: When free will means impossible choices, Fraser makes duty his guiding principle.
Author's notes: the author is deeply indebted to the awesome catwalksalone, and also thanks etcetera_cat and alex51324 for their feedback.
Once you've read the story, please take a moment to vote in the poll below. Ratings go from 1 (low) to 9 (high), so all you need to do is enter a single number in that range into each text entry box. You'll be able to see the Genre information in the header above.
More details about the voting procedure can be found here.
**
Acceptance
In spite of the considerable time and effort I have devoted to the study of Theravada Buddhism, I am forced to acknowledge that I have failed to achieve enlightenment and it seems that I am fated never so to do. I fear that Buddhism and my curse are inimical. With hindsight, I see that it was a ridiculous ambition for someone whose very nature is desire to seek a life free from passion and need. I have wondered from time to time if there is not a philosophical conundrum for all students of the Buddhist tradition in the desire for an absence of desire, but I suspect this is a regrettable instance of ‘sour grapes’ on my part.
“Benny, not the window! I’ll call it in and…”
Too late. Ray could see Fraser was nearly at street level already, his descent slowed to a safe speed as he tore through four projecting canopies on the way down. Ray figured he’d be driving back here later when Fraser insisted on apologizing in person for the property damage. He paused long enough to watch Fraser leap to his feet and start running after the nuns, then headed for the stairs. Back at the Riv he called Dispatch and then set off in pursuit of Fraser. He really didn’t get why the Mountie had to risk his neck like that: even the local uniforms should be able to spot a bunch of transvestite nuns in a yellow convertible with daisies painted on the hood.
“Oh, Fraser! No!” He caught a flash of red on yellow and swerved right. Yeah, there was Fraser, like some kind of Mountie octopus, spread-eagled on the back of the car while one of the nuns hammered at his fingers with a stuffed marmoset. At that speed it was really going to hurt if Fraser came off. On the other hand, it would take more than a piece of smuggled taxidermy to make the Mountie lose his grip.
Bargaining
It seems impossible to deny my curse. I have tested the limits of both endurance and control and find that the harder I try to resist it, the more damaging the consequences when my limits are breached. I believe my only option is to direct it in a way that will be entirely unselfish and to this end I have applied to join the RCMP. A career in law enforcement should give me every opportunity to devote myself and my curse to the cause of justice. It should also provide an environment in which my ‘special skills’ may pass unremarked. Of course, my vigilance must remain constant: the consequences of any slip, any moment of weakness, will be with me forever.
Being stabbed in the hand with a scalpel while cornering at high speed turned out to be exactly what it took to make the Mountie lose his grip, and Fraser was flung from the car into what looked like a fall-breaking pile of old cardboard. Unfortunately, the cardboard cunningly concealed a stash of stolen architectural salvage.
“Fraser, you all right there?” Ray yelled as he leapt from the car and up the fire escape after the nuns. He carried on yelling as he dodged the shower of disposable scalpels thrown from the roof above. “Fraser? Benny? Talk to me!” It looked like he was on his own with this one.
When the first nun got his heel stuck in the steps, causing the second one to stumble and trip over his habit, Ray was pleased to feel that just this once it was the Chicago cop and not the Mountie who got to use their partnership’s extraordinary luck. He ducked the flailing chain-thing wielded by nun number one. “Nice one, sister,” he laughed as the wicked-looking hooks caught in the other nun’s veil, pulling it over his eyes. Ray launched himself at the incapacitated nun, using his momentum to knock the guy down and come to a stop with his gun leveled at nun number two. He had both nuns cuffed to the stair rail before they’d untangled their habits. “I’ll leave you ladies here for a spot of silent prayer, while I go down and check on my partner.”
Depression
I could wish, were that not the very thing I should never do, that the repercussions of each operation of my talent were easier to predict, or even to understand. I have learned from the painful empirical evidence of my youth that any indulgent wishing on my part will generate suffering in equal measure. Wishing for my father, newly returned from a tour of duty, to produce a gift for me from the depths of his pack - a fossil, a small carving, a rock that just might be a meteorite - invariably led to his swift departure, sometimes the very next day. That much was always predictable. Had I but known at the time, it was also predictable that my childish insistence that my favorite of all our sled dogs, Jade, would give birth to an unusually large litter should be balanced by her contracting a uterine infection and leaving my mother to hand-rear nine orphaned puppies.
Ray heard Fraser groan.
“Benny? Thank God! Are you okay?”
“Yes Ray, so far as I am able to ascertain at this point, I am okay. What happened?”
“To you? You hit your head on something when you fell from the nun-mobile. There’s a small cut, but I don’t think you’ve done any serious damage to that thick, Canadian skull of yours.”
“And you?”
“I’m fine, Benny. No damage done here.” Except to my pride, Ray added mentally.
“I was wondering how we came to be tied to a crate of prosthetic legs for horses.”
“Really, that’s what they are?” Ray knew how hard it was to distract Fraser, but maybe with the head injury the Mountie would let this one slide.
“I believe so. And we got here how?”
Damn. “Well, Fraser, you were already doing your Sleeping Beauty thing when I arrived at the scene, so I pursued Sister Stubble and Sister Knuckles up the fire escape, overpowered them and cuffed them to the railings.”
“And then?”
“And then I came back down to see how you were doing and call for back up.” Ray tried to sound indignant.
“And then?”
Ray sighed and dropped the front. “And then I was too busy checking out the head wound to notice that there were more than two nuns. Until they grabbed me and dragged us both in here,” he admitted.
“I’m sorry, Ray.”
“Yeah, next time let me call it in instead of throwing yourself out the window.” He glanced anxiously towards the door. “By the way, what’s a gambrel?”
“It’s a taxidermy tool, Ray. Why do you ask?”
“They’ve gone off to get one, I think they’re going to use it on us.”
“Oh dear.”
“Oh dear?” Ray knew that was the kind ‘oh dear’ to worry about, the Fraser equivalent of running around the room screaming ‘we’re all going to die’.
“Oh dear. It’s. Ah. It’s a tool constructed from lengths of chain with hooks on the end, used for skinning the subject.”
“Yeah, they were swinging one at me before,” Ray nodded. “Wait. Skinning? They’re going to skin us?” He started twisting his wrists frantically, trying to pull free of the ropes binding them behind his back. “Fraser, we got to get out of here! I can’t be skinned.”
“Yes, Ray, if you’ll just keep calm. I’m working on a plan right now.”
Keep calm? Ray was so far beyond calm that they weren’t even in the same country, let alone the same State. “Skinned, Fraser! You’ve got to hurry. I think Ma’s got used to the idea that I might get shot one day, but no way can I be skinned. I can’t do that to her.”
“Ray, if you’d just be quiet a moment, so I can concentrate.”
Denial
I have read Freud’s writings on the Oedipus Complex several times, but although I am sure it must account for the death of my mother, a clear explanation of my culpability eludes me. I missed my father when he was on duty, but there was something very dear and intimate about the time my mother and I spent together. Sometimes she sang to me and told me stories. I helped as much as any young child can with the chores, and she always managed to make the work seem fun. But I think my favorite times were the evenings when we would sit together in silence, she reading or sewing, I reading and drawing, both of us in front of the stove and wrapped in the old quilt from her bed. It undoubtedly disrupted our peace and routine when my father was home, but I would have expected that any wishes I made to protect my isolated existence with my mother would have hurt him, rather than taking my mother from me altogether.
Diefenbaker, the Water Spaniel and the Borzoi provided the perfect distraction. There was no way the taxidermists could resist such interesting specimens. While they chased the other two dogs around the warehouse, Diefenbaker rushed over with a fleshing tool in his jaws and with the serrated edge began to saw through the ropes holding Fraser.
“How’d he find us?”
“He must have followed my scent, Ray.”
Anger
My father? I really thought that once he was dead I should be free to experience my regret over not knowing him well, to indulge a little in wishing we’d spent more time together. Whenever I am tempted to think I am the one who suffers - from his unsolicited advice, obtuseness, and untimely interruptions - I remind myself that my lack of control has kept him from his final rest. I fear he will remain as a constant reminder of my lack of discipline and humility.
As soon as he was free, Fraser crawled over to begin releasing Ray, while Dief flung himself into the taxidermist/dog melee happening on the other side of the warehouse. Ray, sitting facing the door, kept up a constant low-level grumbling as Fraser fumbled with the ropes. Before Fraser, frustratingly uncoordinated as a result of the blow to his head, could untie his hands, Ray leapt to his feet and made a dash across the room. Fraser looked up and managed to focus just in time to see Ray shoulder-charge the Mother Superior who was heading towards Diefenbaker with a tail stripping tool and a bottle of Stop Rot.
Struggling with nausea and an alarming blurriness of vision, Fraser could only watch and wonder if he should try to protect Ray, to make a wish on Ray’s behalf and damn the consequences. In the moment of indecision Ray slipped in a puddle of spilled Stop Rot, and with his arms tied behind his back was unable to regain his balance and prevent himself from falling into the arms of one of the junior nuns.
From across the room Fraser heard the brain spoon in the nun’s outstretched hand sink into Ray’s throat. The sound was deafening.
Bargaining
Once I reached Depot, I thought that I had eliminated this problem from my life. I used the talent only on a very limited basis during training to ensure that I was never too tired nor my faculties too limited to learn whatever might be useful in my career. That I was consistently top of my class and consistently avoided by my peers were unlooked for side effects. Later, during field coaching, I learned how to ensure my safety in difficult terrain, dodge bullets and enhance my senses just enough to ensure the success of my mission but not enough to cause suspicion or generate unpleasant consequences. In point of fact, I have never been able to determine how the balancing process operates when I am engaged in the pursuit of justice. I imagine that for every good deed effected with the use of my talent, a small harm befalls a malfeasant somewhere.
Fraser sat awkwardly in the chair at the side of the bed. “Ray, there’s something I want to ask you.”
Ray nodded and smiled weakly. He was not supposed to be talking for the next couple of days, and besides it hurt to use anything more than an almost breathless whisper.
“Well, I suppose it’s something I want to tell you. Something about me.”
Ray smiled again and raised an encouraging eyebrow. He was tired from the surgery, and still maybe just a little pissed at Fraser that he needed surgery at all, but any time his partner wanted to share was a time for Ray to pay careful attention.
“I’m. I’m not sure. I’m not sure that I should tell you. But I do still need to ask you.”
Ray’s eye rolling was unaffected by the injury to his throat, so he used it liberally.
“Ray, you know you’re very important to me?”
Not the conversation he was expecting, then. Ray nodded.
“Really very important.”
Ray’s eyelids fluttered closed just for a moment before he nodded.
“And you know that there’s nothing I would not do to protect you?”
Ray nodded more slowly, locking gazes with Fraser, as he struggled to sit a little higher without pulling the drip from his hand.
“It’s just that if, there were something more that I could do for you, something I wanted to do for you, but my actions would not be without consequences…”
As Fraser trailed off into awkward silence, Ray reached out and covered his hand with his own. Fraser didn’t move.
“I can’t make you responsible for consequences I cannot predict or control. And I don’t feel I can make the choice for you.” Fraser tugged his ear and looked down at his boots.
Ray checked out the blush spreading down Fraser’s neck and squeezed his hand. Unexpected, perhaps, but this could be the conversation he’d been hoping for.
Acceptance
Diefenbaker was the result of my first lapse of will and, had he not been most insistent, I should have called him Hubris. I was tracking a big game poacher, Herman Melville, who had come over the border to the Yukon from Alaska. It was early in my career, I was enthusiastic and overly keen to impress my superior officers (Sergeant Stefansson in particular) and as a result I grew careless. And carelessness left me unconscious in a bear trap constructed by the poachers. I was not the only careless one that day, a young half-wolf had fallen into the same trap. Naturally, I helped him to escape, though the effort rendered me unconscious for a second time. Perhaps my mental weakness may be attributed to my physical injuries, but on regaining consciousness I could not prevent myself from wishing heartily that the wolf I had assisted might have the decency to return the favor. Thus it was that Diefenbaker was obliged to come back, with a rope he tells me he stole from the very poacher I was tracking, and pull me to safety. In Chinese custom, when you safe a life you become responsible for the one you save, but my penance is to be forever responsible for my savior. Diefenbaker takes shameless advantage of this as well as of his deafness.
Ray was still banned from talking. He assumed that, had he asked, he’d also be banned from getting out of bed and following Fraser up to the hospital roof, but he hadn’t asked and Fraser was determined.
“Ray, I’m afraid that I haven’t been entirely honest with you. That is, I have been keeping things from you. Things about myself. But I can’t keep it from you - don’t want to keep it from you - any longer.” He paused and looked expectantly at Ray.
Ray looked back. “Go ahead, Benny” he whispered, glad he wasn’t hooked to a heart monitor right now.
“Well, Ray, it’s something that I have known about myself for many years. In fact, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware that I am not like other people.”
Ray was torn between amusement at the idea of Fraser being like other people, and desire to know - right now - all the ways in which Fraser was different from other people. Before he could settle on the appropriate response Fraser was pulling out a coin and showing him both sides.
“Heads or tails?”
“Heads,” Ray responded automatically.
Fraser flipped the quarter, then showed it to Ray. “Heads it is Ray. Which would you prefer this time?”
“Huh?”
“Heads or tails?”
“Heads.”
Fraser repeated the flipping and the revealing. “Heads again.”
Ray adopted the universal ‘and your point is?’ stance.
“Heads or tails?”
“Heads.” This conversation was heading in a bizarre direction. Even for Fraser. And Ray was angry with himself for easing up on the tight control he’d had over his feelings ever since the stupid Mountie had called him ‘Detective Armani’ and blown his cover.
Again the coin came down heads.
“You made me come all the way up here for this?” Ray whispered fiercely. “I thought you wanted to tell me something important about yourself, not that Turnbull had given you his copy of Conjuring for Mounties.”
“Ray! You’re not supposed to be talking, remember.”
“I wouldn’t be if you’d let me stay in bed,” Ray knew he sounded sulky, but he was too tired to do anything about it.
“Ray, what I’m showing you is not prestidigitation. The fact is, I am choosing the outcome of the coin toss. Were we to stand up here until dinner time every toss of the coin would give the result you requested.”
“I’m not staying here until dinner time and I think you missed the point of tossing a coin.” And now he could add self-righteous to the ways he was sounding more like one of his nephews than a seasoned cop.
“My point was to demonstrate in a trivial and harmless way that I am endowed with a special power. That may sound like a privilege, but believe me, the nature of this power has caused me much unhappiness and the responsibility of wielding it weighs upon me every day.”
That pierced Ray’s sulk and made him pay attention again. “Special powers? I knew the red suit wasn’t regular uniform.”
“In ways that don’t need exploring at this juncture, I slowly came to realise when I was still very young that I could make things happen simply by wishing it to be so. It was a little hit and miss to begin with and I gradually learned to be appropriately precise when expressing my desires. What I was less quick to learn was that each wish fulfilled was balanced by unintended consequences.”
“Unintended consequences?” Ray made no effort to hide his skepticism.
“The undesired consequences are usually proportionate to the desire fulfilled. If, for example, I were to wish for a rare book then it would undoubtedly be mine, but for someone else their lives would be changed detrimentally by the lack of that book. If I were to wish for someone to love me, there would doubtless be deaths involved. It is my assumption that by determining the outcome of a coin toss - and a meaningless coin toss at that - I am causing negligible harm to the order of the universe.”
Ray shook his head. “Benny, you shouldn’t beat yourself up about these things. It’s luck. Dumb luck.” He ignored Fraser’s hurt expression. “Except your luck isn’t so dumb and you’re definitely the luckiest guy I’ve ever met. If you weren’t you’d have died at least once a week since you got to Chicago.”
“But that’s what I’m telling you, Ray. Luck has nothing to do with it. It’s the power of my desire that keeps me safe. And it keeps me safe only in the pursuit of justice. Therein lies my dilemma.”
“Go on,” Ray didn’t want to hear this. Really. He wanted to go back to the moment before the coin tossing when he thought his partner was sane - well, sane for a Mountie - and just might be about to declare himself.
“Thus far, Ray, I have been using my power only to enhance my own skills as an officer of the law to maximise the prevention of crime. Working in partnership with you, I find myself torn between the desire to extend my powers to cover your police work and to protect you, and caution about making you responsible for the unpleasant side effects of my power.”
“This is what you were trying to tell me about yesterday, right?” Ray had found somewhere to sit down and was looking up at Fraser with wry amusement. A whole night he’d spent replaying that conversation instead of sleeping, indulging in fantasies, figuring out how to tell Benny that everything was okay and he felt the same way.
“Yes, Ray. I’m sorry if that wasn’t completely obvious at the time.”
“My bad. It should have been completely obvious that my crazy Mountie partner was trying to tell me that he’s not freakishly lucky, he just has Super Powers and would I like a share in that.” Ray’s whisper was getting increasingly raspy, and the pain in his throat was sapping his energy.
“Ray, really, you should stop talking. Dr Baffin was most insistent.”
Ray stood and dropped his arm around Fraser’s shoulders. “You can protect me anytime you want and I don’t care who has to pay. Well, so long as it’s not Ma or the kids. Frannie, on the other hand could do with a little suffering.” He grinned. “Come on, I need to get back in bed before they notice I’m missing.”
Moving on
Fraser was barely aware of the fact that he continued holding Ray’s hand long after he’d reattached the drip. He was, however, entirely conscious of caressing his sleeping partner’s cheek before leaving the hospital for the night.
END
**
Poll Vote for this story
Author: lamentables
Team: Whimsy
Prompt: "You made me come all the way up here for this?"
Pairing(s): Fraser/Vecchio
Length: 3,700 words
Rating: PG-13 (for violence)
Warnings: None
Summary: When free will means impossible choices, Fraser makes duty his guiding principle.
Author's notes: the author is deeply indebted to the awesome catwalksalone, and also thanks etcetera_cat and alex51324 for their feedback.
Once you've read the story, please take a moment to vote in the poll below. Ratings go from 1 (low) to 9 (high), so all you need to do is enter a single number in that range into each text entry box. You'll be able to see the Genre information in the header above.
More details about the voting procedure can be found here.
**
Acceptance
In spite of the considerable time and effort I have devoted to the study of Theravada Buddhism, I am forced to acknowledge that I have failed to achieve enlightenment and it seems that I am fated never so to do. I fear that Buddhism and my curse are inimical. With hindsight, I see that it was a ridiculous ambition for someone whose very nature is desire to seek a life free from passion and need. I have wondered from time to time if there is not a philosophical conundrum for all students of the Buddhist tradition in the desire for an absence of desire, but I suspect this is a regrettable instance of ‘sour grapes’ on my part.
“Benny, not the window! I’ll call it in and…”
Too late. Ray could see Fraser was nearly at street level already, his descent slowed to a safe speed as he tore through four projecting canopies on the way down. Ray figured he’d be driving back here later when Fraser insisted on apologizing in person for the property damage. He paused long enough to watch Fraser leap to his feet and start running after the nuns, then headed for the stairs. Back at the Riv he called Dispatch and then set off in pursuit of Fraser. He really didn’t get why the Mountie had to risk his neck like that: even the local uniforms should be able to spot a bunch of transvestite nuns in a yellow convertible with daisies painted on the hood.
“Oh, Fraser! No!” He caught a flash of red on yellow and swerved right. Yeah, there was Fraser, like some kind of Mountie octopus, spread-eagled on the back of the car while one of the nuns hammered at his fingers with a stuffed marmoset. At that speed it was really going to hurt if Fraser came off. On the other hand, it would take more than a piece of smuggled taxidermy to make the Mountie lose his grip.
Bargaining
It seems impossible to deny my curse. I have tested the limits of both endurance and control and find that the harder I try to resist it, the more damaging the consequences when my limits are breached. I believe my only option is to direct it in a way that will be entirely unselfish and to this end I have applied to join the RCMP. A career in law enforcement should give me every opportunity to devote myself and my curse to the cause of justice. It should also provide an environment in which my ‘special skills’ may pass unremarked. Of course, my vigilance must remain constant: the consequences of any slip, any moment of weakness, will be with me forever.
Being stabbed in the hand with a scalpel while cornering at high speed turned out to be exactly what it took to make the Mountie lose his grip, and Fraser was flung from the car into what looked like a fall-breaking pile of old cardboard. Unfortunately, the cardboard cunningly concealed a stash of stolen architectural salvage.
“Fraser, you all right there?” Ray yelled as he leapt from the car and up the fire escape after the nuns. He carried on yelling as he dodged the shower of disposable scalpels thrown from the roof above. “Fraser? Benny? Talk to me!” It looked like he was on his own with this one.
When the first nun got his heel stuck in the steps, causing the second one to stumble and trip over his habit, Ray was pleased to feel that just this once it was the Chicago cop and not the Mountie who got to use their partnership’s extraordinary luck. He ducked the flailing chain-thing wielded by nun number one. “Nice one, sister,” he laughed as the wicked-looking hooks caught in the other nun’s veil, pulling it over his eyes. Ray launched himself at the incapacitated nun, using his momentum to knock the guy down and come to a stop with his gun leveled at nun number two. He had both nuns cuffed to the stair rail before they’d untangled their habits. “I’ll leave you ladies here for a spot of silent prayer, while I go down and check on my partner.”
Depression
I could wish, were that not the very thing I should never do, that the repercussions of each operation of my talent were easier to predict, or even to understand. I have learned from the painful empirical evidence of my youth that any indulgent wishing on my part will generate suffering in equal measure. Wishing for my father, newly returned from a tour of duty, to produce a gift for me from the depths of his pack - a fossil, a small carving, a rock that just might be a meteorite - invariably led to his swift departure, sometimes the very next day. That much was always predictable. Had I but known at the time, it was also predictable that my childish insistence that my favorite of all our sled dogs, Jade, would give birth to an unusually large litter should be balanced by her contracting a uterine infection and leaving my mother to hand-rear nine orphaned puppies.
Ray heard Fraser groan.
“Benny? Thank God! Are you okay?”
“Yes Ray, so far as I am able to ascertain at this point, I am okay. What happened?”
“To you? You hit your head on something when you fell from the nun-mobile. There’s a small cut, but I don’t think you’ve done any serious damage to that thick, Canadian skull of yours.”
“And you?”
“I’m fine, Benny. No damage done here.” Except to my pride, Ray added mentally.
“I was wondering how we came to be tied to a crate of prosthetic legs for horses.”
“Really, that’s what they are?” Ray knew how hard it was to distract Fraser, but maybe with the head injury the Mountie would let this one slide.
“I believe so. And we got here how?”
Damn. “Well, Fraser, you were already doing your Sleeping Beauty thing when I arrived at the scene, so I pursued Sister Stubble and Sister Knuckles up the fire escape, overpowered them and cuffed them to the railings.”
“And then?”
“And then I came back down to see how you were doing and call for back up.” Ray tried to sound indignant.
“And then?”
Ray sighed and dropped the front. “And then I was too busy checking out the head wound to notice that there were more than two nuns. Until they grabbed me and dragged us both in here,” he admitted.
“I’m sorry, Ray.”
“Yeah, next time let me call it in instead of throwing yourself out the window.” He glanced anxiously towards the door. “By the way, what’s a gambrel?”
“It’s a taxidermy tool, Ray. Why do you ask?”
“They’ve gone off to get one, I think they’re going to use it on us.”
“Oh dear.”
“Oh dear?” Ray knew that was the kind ‘oh dear’ to worry about, the Fraser equivalent of running around the room screaming ‘we’re all going to die’.
“Oh dear. It’s. Ah. It’s a tool constructed from lengths of chain with hooks on the end, used for skinning the subject.”
“Yeah, they were swinging one at me before,” Ray nodded. “Wait. Skinning? They’re going to skin us?” He started twisting his wrists frantically, trying to pull free of the ropes binding them behind his back. “Fraser, we got to get out of here! I can’t be skinned.”
“Yes, Ray, if you’ll just keep calm. I’m working on a plan right now.”
Keep calm? Ray was so far beyond calm that they weren’t even in the same country, let alone the same State. “Skinned, Fraser! You’ve got to hurry. I think Ma’s got used to the idea that I might get shot one day, but no way can I be skinned. I can’t do that to her.”
“Ray, if you’d just be quiet a moment, so I can concentrate.”
Denial
I have read Freud’s writings on the Oedipus Complex several times, but although I am sure it must account for the death of my mother, a clear explanation of my culpability eludes me. I missed my father when he was on duty, but there was something very dear and intimate about the time my mother and I spent together. Sometimes she sang to me and told me stories. I helped as much as any young child can with the chores, and she always managed to make the work seem fun. But I think my favorite times were the evenings when we would sit together in silence, she reading or sewing, I reading and drawing, both of us in front of the stove and wrapped in the old quilt from her bed. It undoubtedly disrupted our peace and routine when my father was home, but I would have expected that any wishes I made to protect my isolated existence with my mother would have hurt him, rather than taking my mother from me altogether.
Diefenbaker, the Water Spaniel and the Borzoi provided the perfect distraction. There was no way the taxidermists could resist such interesting specimens. While they chased the other two dogs around the warehouse, Diefenbaker rushed over with a fleshing tool in his jaws and with the serrated edge began to saw through the ropes holding Fraser.
“How’d he find us?”
“He must have followed my scent, Ray.”
Anger
My father? I really thought that once he was dead I should be free to experience my regret over not knowing him well, to indulge a little in wishing we’d spent more time together. Whenever I am tempted to think I am the one who suffers - from his unsolicited advice, obtuseness, and untimely interruptions - I remind myself that my lack of control has kept him from his final rest. I fear he will remain as a constant reminder of my lack of discipline and humility.
As soon as he was free, Fraser crawled over to begin releasing Ray, while Dief flung himself into the taxidermist/dog melee happening on the other side of the warehouse. Ray, sitting facing the door, kept up a constant low-level grumbling as Fraser fumbled with the ropes. Before Fraser, frustratingly uncoordinated as a result of the blow to his head, could untie his hands, Ray leapt to his feet and made a dash across the room. Fraser looked up and managed to focus just in time to see Ray shoulder-charge the Mother Superior who was heading towards Diefenbaker with a tail stripping tool and a bottle of Stop Rot.
Struggling with nausea and an alarming blurriness of vision, Fraser could only watch and wonder if he should try to protect Ray, to make a wish on Ray’s behalf and damn the consequences. In the moment of indecision Ray slipped in a puddle of spilled Stop Rot, and with his arms tied behind his back was unable to regain his balance and prevent himself from falling into the arms of one of the junior nuns.
From across the room Fraser heard the brain spoon in the nun’s outstretched hand sink into Ray’s throat. The sound was deafening.
Bargaining
Once I reached Depot, I thought that I had eliminated this problem from my life. I used the talent only on a very limited basis during training to ensure that I was never too tired nor my faculties too limited to learn whatever might be useful in my career. That I was consistently top of my class and consistently avoided by my peers were unlooked for side effects. Later, during field coaching, I learned how to ensure my safety in difficult terrain, dodge bullets and enhance my senses just enough to ensure the success of my mission but not enough to cause suspicion or generate unpleasant consequences. In point of fact, I have never been able to determine how the balancing process operates when I am engaged in the pursuit of justice. I imagine that for every good deed effected with the use of my talent, a small harm befalls a malfeasant somewhere.
Fraser sat awkwardly in the chair at the side of the bed. “Ray, there’s something I want to ask you.”
Ray nodded and smiled weakly. He was not supposed to be talking for the next couple of days, and besides it hurt to use anything more than an almost breathless whisper.
“Well, I suppose it’s something I want to tell you. Something about me.”
Ray smiled again and raised an encouraging eyebrow. He was tired from the surgery, and still maybe just a little pissed at Fraser that he needed surgery at all, but any time his partner wanted to share was a time for Ray to pay careful attention.
“I’m. I’m not sure. I’m not sure that I should tell you. But I do still need to ask you.”
Ray’s eye rolling was unaffected by the injury to his throat, so he used it liberally.
“Ray, you know you’re very important to me?”
Not the conversation he was expecting, then. Ray nodded.
“Really very important.”
Ray’s eyelids fluttered closed just for a moment before he nodded.
“And you know that there’s nothing I would not do to protect you?”
Ray nodded more slowly, locking gazes with Fraser, as he struggled to sit a little higher without pulling the drip from his hand.
“It’s just that if, there were something more that I could do for you, something I wanted to do for you, but my actions would not be without consequences…”
As Fraser trailed off into awkward silence, Ray reached out and covered his hand with his own. Fraser didn’t move.
“I can’t make you responsible for consequences I cannot predict or control. And I don’t feel I can make the choice for you.” Fraser tugged his ear and looked down at his boots.
Ray checked out the blush spreading down Fraser’s neck and squeezed his hand. Unexpected, perhaps, but this could be the conversation he’d been hoping for.
Acceptance
Diefenbaker was the result of my first lapse of will and, had he not been most insistent, I should have called him Hubris. I was tracking a big game poacher, Herman Melville, who had come over the border to the Yukon from Alaska. It was early in my career, I was enthusiastic and overly keen to impress my superior officers (Sergeant Stefansson in particular) and as a result I grew careless. And carelessness left me unconscious in a bear trap constructed by the poachers. I was not the only careless one that day, a young half-wolf had fallen into the same trap. Naturally, I helped him to escape, though the effort rendered me unconscious for a second time. Perhaps my mental weakness may be attributed to my physical injuries, but on regaining consciousness I could not prevent myself from wishing heartily that the wolf I had assisted might have the decency to return the favor. Thus it was that Diefenbaker was obliged to come back, with a rope he tells me he stole from the very poacher I was tracking, and pull me to safety. In Chinese custom, when you safe a life you become responsible for the one you save, but my penance is to be forever responsible for my savior. Diefenbaker takes shameless advantage of this as well as of his deafness.
Ray was still banned from talking. He assumed that, had he asked, he’d also be banned from getting out of bed and following Fraser up to the hospital roof, but he hadn’t asked and Fraser was determined.
“Ray, I’m afraid that I haven’t been entirely honest with you. That is, I have been keeping things from you. Things about myself. But I can’t keep it from you - don’t want to keep it from you - any longer.” He paused and looked expectantly at Ray.
Ray looked back. “Go ahead, Benny” he whispered, glad he wasn’t hooked to a heart monitor right now.
“Well, Ray, it’s something that I have known about myself for many years. In fact, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware that I am not like other people.”
Ray was torn between amusement at the idea of Fraser being like other people, and desire to know - right now - all the ways in which Fraser was different from other people. Before he could settle on the appropriate response Fraser was pulling out a coin and showing him both sides.
“Heads or tails?”
“Heads,” Ray responded automatically.
Fraser flipped the quarter, then showed it to Ray. “Heads it is Ray. Which would you prefer this time?”
“Huh?”
“Heads or tails?”
“Heads.”
Fraser repeated the flipping and the revealing. “Heads again.”
Ray adopted the universal ‘and your point is?’ stance.
“Heads or tails?”
“Heads.” This conversation was heading in a bizarre direction. Even for Fraser. And Ray was angry with himself for easing up on the tight control he’d had over his feelings ever since the stupid Mountie had called him ‘Detective Armani’ and blown his cover.
Again the coin came down heads.
“You made me come all the way up here for this?” Ray whispered fiercely. “I thought you wanted to tell me something important about yourself, not that Turnbull had given you his copy of Conjuring for Mounties.”
“Ray! You’re not supposed to be talking, remember.”
“I wouldn’t be if you’d let me stay in bed,” Ray knew he sounded sulky, but he was too tired to do anything about it.
“Ray, what I’m showing you is not prestidigitation. The fact is, I am choosing the outcome of the coin toss. Were we to stand up here until dinner time every toss of the coin would give the result you requested.”
“I’m not staying here until dinner time and I think you missed the point of tossing a coin.” And now he could add self-righteous to the ways he was sounding more like one of his nephews than a seasoned cop.
“My point was to demonstrate in a trivial and harmless way that I am endowed with a special power. That may sound like a privilege, but believe me, the nature of this power has caused me much unhappiness and the responsibility of wielding it weighs upon me every day.”
That pierced Ray’s sulk and made him pay attention again. “Special powers? I knew the red suit wasn’t regular uniform.”
“In ways that don’t need exploring at this juncture, I slowly came to realise when I was still very young that I could make things happen simply by wishing it to be so. It was a little hit and miss to begin with and I gradually learned to be appropriately precise when expressing my desires. What I was less quick to learn was that each wish fulfilled was balanced by unintended consequences.”
“Unintended consequences?” Ray made no effort to hide his skepticism.
“The undesired consequences are usually proportionate to the desire fulfilled. If, for example, I were to wish for a rare book then it would undoubtedly be mine, but for someone else their lives would be changed detrimentally by the lack of that book. If I were to wish for someone to love me, there would doubtless be deaths involved. It is my assumption that by determining the outcome of a coin toss - and a meaningless coin toss at that - I am causing negligible harm to the order of the universe.”
Ray shook his head. “Benny, you shouldn’t beat yourself up about these things. It’s luck. Dumb luck.” He ignored Fraser’s hurt expression. “Except your luck isn’t so dumb and you’re definitely the luckiest guy I’ve ever met. If you weren’t you’d have died at least once a week since you got to Chicago.”
“But that’s what I’m telling you, Ray. Luck has nothing to do with it. It’s the power of my desire that keeps me safe. And it keeps me safe only in the pursuit of justice. Therein lies my dilemma.”
“Go on,” Ray didn’t want to hear this. Really. He wanted to go back to the moment before the coin tossing when he thought his partner was sane - well, sane for a Mountie - and just might be about to declare himself.
“Thus far, Ray, I have been using my power only to enhance my own skills as an officer of the law to maximise the prevention of crime. Working in partnership with you, I find myself torn between the desire to extend my powers to cover your police work and to protect you, and caution about making you responsible for the unpleasant side effects of my power.”
“This is what you were trying to tell me about yesterday, right?” Ray had found somewhere to sit down and was looking up at Fraser with wry amusement. A whole night he’d spent replaying that conversation instead of sleeping, indulging in fantasies, figuring out how to tell Benny that everything was okay and he felt the same way.
“Yes, Ray. I’m sorry if that wasn’t completely obvious at the time.”
“My bad. It should have been completely obvious that my crazy Mountie partner was trying to tell me that he’s not freakishly lucky, he just has Super Powers and would I like a share in that.” Ray’s whisper was getting increasingly raspy, and the pain in his throat was sapping his energy.
“Ray, really, you should stop talking. Dr Baffin was most insistent.”
Ray stood and dropped his arm around Fraser’s shoulders. “You can protect me anytime you want and I don’t care who has to pay. Well, so long as it’s not Ma or the kids. Frannie, on the other hand could do with a little suffering.” He grinned. “Come on, I need to get back in bed before they notice I’m missing.”
Moving on
Fraser was barely aware of the fact that he continued holding Ray’s hand long after he’d reattached the drip. He was, however, entirely conscious of caressing his sleeping partner’s cheek before leaving the hospital for the night.
END
**
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